QuoteReplyTopic: BRATZ with Footballs??? Posted: September 26 2007 at 5:00am

WE'LL ADMIT the PROMOs LOOK AWFULLY CUTE...or ARE THEY SO-CUTE-THEY'RE-AWFUL?? BUT HAVING BEEN SUCKERED in LAST WEEK by the PROMOs for GOOD LUCK CHUCK, WE'RE a TAD LEERY. AND BESIDES, THIS IS a SLOW WEEK for TRULY RAZZ-ABLE MOVIES, and with THE ROCK'sPREVIOUS RAZZIE® RECORD, the ODDS FAVOR THIS BEING a CLUNKER INSTEAD of a KIDDIE CLASSIC.

FEEL FREE to LET US KNOW YER THOUGHTS BELOW...

Johnson: "Well. actually, I just desperately needed a hit movie of any kind, and little what's-her-name here didn't know any better..."

I read somewhere on the net (it may have been at RT) that The Rock's next film is either a sequel or a remake of "Witch Mountian." Since he started out as a mucho-macho pro-wrestler, I can't figure out why he'd want to grow up to be Don Knotts. The man's career must really be in the toilet if this is what he's choosing to do...

Response from Head RAZZberry: Here's a LINK to the IMDb page for what's for now being called just WITCH MOUNTAIN. It's said to be a remake of ESCAPE TO WITCH MOUNTAIN, and while a remake makes more sense than a sequel 32 years later, the IMDb isn't alwaze reliable on such matters, so who nose. Either way, yes, The Rockdoes seem to be heading in a new (and possibly career-ruining) direction...

What Iger sees in this guy I don't know (and I probably don't want to know),
since his performances are stonier than those statues on Easter Island. The
former clearly also failed to take into account one rather important detail
when making this picture: We've already seen this story HUNDREDS of times
before, and would prefer not to have it rammed down our throats again!

I've seen the trailers for this movie a half-dozen times. I didn't laugh at the bubble bath. I didn't laugh at changing the channels. I didn't laugh at the football helmet for a car passenger. I didn't laugh when he chose the token stupid white woman to be the nanny. I didn't laugh when the girl gave the Rock cinnamon. I didn't laugh at the bulldog with a tutu. The trailer was NOT as dull as Little Man, but it appears to me this comedy is tepid at best, and I kept wondering if Three Men and a Baby covered the same ground a whole lot better.

Sometimes, it feels like we've lost the art of producing cute, fun comedies about ordinary lives anymore. I'm talking about romantic comedies and family comedies. Yeah, one could stretch things out and include Knocked Up and Superbad, and one could stretch things out even further so Shrek the Third took fractured fairytales into this, but by and large, all the movies along these lines lately have been poorly written and poorly acted and, with one exception, they've done poorly at the box office as well as with the critics.

Going down Box Office Mojo's top grossers of 2007 list, the first movie I come across that's in this category, is I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry, the only one to do really well at the box office. However, this is an Adam Sandler comedy, a comedian who you either love or loathe. Then further on down is Music and Lyrics, which from what I've read and heard is okay. Others are Are We Done Yet?,No Reservations, then you have to go way down for The Nanny Diaries, Good Luck Chuck, Firehouse Dog, Daddy Day Camp, I Think I Love My Wife, Once (a critic favorite, and which I understand is an excellent movie), Lucky You, Sydney White, and The Ex (a.k.a. Fast Track).

As you can see, these romantic and family comedies, all of which should be cute and funny, are okay at best, and several of them are among the worse movies released this year. Can't we go back to Keaton, Chaplin and Lloyd and make people laugh at the ordinary life taken into cute (for us), but uncomfortable (for the characters) situations anymore?

Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd understood something about comedy that none of the modern film comics even vaguely comprehend. We loved the tramp and all the characters portrayed by Keaton and Lloyd because when we saw them on the screen, we were watching ourselves; not some pathetic loser we would rather beat up than laugh at. Further, they understood that real comedy always treds just this side of tragedy. It isn't about bodily functions or four letter words. It's about things we all see, experience and recognize.

Nine times out of ten, in art as in life, there is no truth to be discovered, only an error to be exposed.--H.L. Menken

I couldn't have said it any better myself. That's why I hold John Candy in high esteem; he also understood this, likely since he had to go through his own personal nightmare of watching his father go when he was 5 and basically knowing his whole life that his own heart would get him in the end too, and always made sure to make his characters accessible so that even when the material around him suffered, he made you keep wanting to follow him. Thus, his victories are worth it, and we'll get more lasting satisfaction at Buck Russell waving a cheerful goodbye to his niece knowing that he's done positive good for her than we ever will at seeing the moron of the week dramatically proclaiming to the wife he doesn't really deserve to have in the first place that he'll never take her for granted again and as such will become a total slave in every sense of the word to the family he'd be happier apart from (still with me?) until the pre-planned sequel makes it clear he never meant any of it, as if we hadn't already guessed.

Are we talking about schadenfreude? Friedrich Neitzsche apparently once commented that humor is schadenfreude with a clear conscience. I'm not so sure I'd go that far. For example, I laugh at kumquats. They're small, the variety we see in stores are oval, they have peels like a tangerine, they have as many seeds as some oranges and the ones we buy in the stores are very sour. All of that being together in one itty bitty fruit strikes me as funny. It's not that the kumquat is suffering, but I've never come across as useless of a fruit as a kumquat.

Now, the fact that we still go ahead and use them may invoke schadenfreude. . . .

Wow, I've talked about schadenfreude, Nietzsche and kumquats in the Razzie forum. I bet that's a first. . . .

That said, I think you and wetbandit are right. Whether you're dealing with the pathos of Chaplin's tramp, the vaudevillian screwball of the Marx Brothers or the absurdity of Monty Python, it's by and large schadenfreude. I'm not sure where "Spam" fits in, though, and I'm not sure I want to find out. . . .

Originally posted by saturnwatcher

Chaplin, Keaton and Lloyd understood something about comedy that none of the modern film comics even vaguely comprehend. We loved the tramp and all the characters portrayed by Keaton and Lloyd because when we saw them on the screen, we were watching ourselves; not some pathetic loser we would rather beat up than laugh at. Further, they understood that real comedy always treds just this side of tragedy. It isn't about bodily functions or four letter words. It's about things we all see, experience and recognize.

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